Yuki Onna: Director's Commentary
by Void
Summary: Long-winded rambling about Rurouni Kenshin, storytelling, and the trials and tribulations of writing by intuition. Also, everything you wanted to know about Yuki Onna, sometimes asked, and only got hints of answers to.
1. Chapters 1  through 5

1/KOHAI

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The imagery in this chapter is almost straight from the Yuki Onna segment of Kwaidan.

Basically, I was watching Kwaidan - which is a great movie, by the way - and was struck by the (highly superficial) similarities between the Snow Woman/Tomoe and The Wife/Kaoru. The shocking moment of the Kwaidan segment is, of course, the transformation - the realization that the cheerful, industrious, innocent wife _is in fact_ the chilling (literally) snow spirit.

It was only a passing fancy, but once I realized that the boy in the story would have to be Kenshin, and the identity of the old man could only fit Akira... Suddenly the idea of doing a Shinta + Akira brotherly bickering ficlet was simply too much to resist. Thus Yuki Onna version RK was born.

I actually wrote a chapter 2 that led nowhere and eventually deleted it. Having created the setup of a samurai and his apprentice coming across the snow woman, I had no idea where to take it. I had no further inspiration.

That was 2002.

The fic languished.

For years.

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2/HUSHED

So it had always been in the back of my mind - this fic I had started and couldn't finish. Every now and then, it would haunt me - a recurring itch. I try not to abandon a project at all, but if I do, it's usually because I know exactly where it's going and I'm bored by the prospect of actually sitting down and writing it.

With Yuki Onna, on the other hand... It had been such a simple idea - take the very straightforward snow woman story and do a character swap - but once I had written the first chapter it was actually nearly impossible to imagine how it would play out. For one thing, switching the wood cutters (cameo appearances in this chapter, by the way!) to samurai suddenly made the whole story immensely more complicated, because samurai have much more complicated lives. And from the other angle, inserting Tomoe and Kaoru into the story knotted everything up, because as RK characters, Tomoe may be highly introverted but she's no ice demon, and the idea of Kaoru being a mask for Tomoe is not only absurd but insulting.

So I was stuck. For years.

But then one day last fall, somehow, the answer just dawned on me.

This could only work if the snow woman and the wife really were Tomoe and Kaoru, true to themselves. Tomoe could be a lonely and isolated snow spirit but not cruel, and Kaoru had to be her own person - a woman who has no past, a woman _possessed_ by this frightening spirit.

And the idea of possession - to have the horror story not only from the boy's (Shinta's) point of view but from the wife's (Kaoru's) point of view - that caught my interest.

Yuki Onna was back in business.

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3/A LISTLESS SPRING

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Thus began the saga of navigating the reborn RK Yuki Onna. Every turn in the story presented a new question, a new problem - and I was the one writing it!

One of the first things I realized I had to do was try to get inside the Snow Woman/Tomoe's mind - since she's a different creature than either Kwaidan's Snow Woman or RK's Tomoe, I couldn't just write her, I had to get to know her. I wrote a few pieces from her point of view - they could only be poetry, because her thoughts and perceptions wouldn't follow a normal human cadence. Some of that would up in the story itself. I wish I had the rest, but unfortunately the hard drive it was stored on crashed.

So anyway, this is how I developed the relationship between Tomoe and Akira. It's actually pretty similar to how I think of them in RK, but the key difference is that as the Snow Woman, it isn't that Tomoe doesn't express her emotions but rather that she really doesn't feel them the way a human does. So she has loneliness, and she responds very strongly to Akira's open heart, but she doesn't fall in love with him the way a human might. Instead, she develops this overpowering yearning to experience mortal life - because she's gotten a small taste of what she's been missing. And Akira has a wry sort of sense of humor about it, dying of love for a spirit (or as a consequence of loving a spirit) who could never die of love for him - or even know what that feels like.

That took forever for me to figure out.

And even here, very early on (I hadn't even realized how early) this story takes on a very sad, very lonesome tone...

4/SUMMER and 5/TRANSFORMED

So then with Tomoe and Akira out of the way - at least the core of their characters - I had to figure out Shinta - which again was unexpectedly challenging.

Part of the reason I had started this fic was the charm of writing a teenage Shinta without Hiko, without the Bakumatsu. I really liked the idea of him being kind of bitter and surly but not *broken* the way Kenshin was by his war.

Which worked fine... until I realized that I had already written him as the apprentice to a samurai - so I had already introduced issues of violence and class differences. And then I killed Akira, so Shinta still had to cope with an early adulthood...

Once I gave him a sword, it seemed silly to keep up the pretense. Especially as I was still doing a modicum of research at the time and learned that, traditionally, a samurai adopted a new name upon reaching maturity. So he became Kenshin after all.

Kenshin - but with some differences. His story became more about the fact that he had his roots in the peasant class but he had been plucked out of it and inserted into the wealthy and violent oppressor class. Whereas RK Kenshin has this huge guilt complex over how unique he is - he has this enormous killing potential, and he uses it - here it's a much more... humble sort of guilt. Less personal. More structural.

There's injustice in the entire society - but rather than guilt over his actions in a revolution trying to correct the society, Shinta feels guilt over actions that maintain the status quo. Without quite realizing it, I was shifting from a world that had had some light comedic elements (Shinta griping in chapter 1 to a blithely oblivious Akira - at least I thought it was funny) - to a setting even more brutal than the prequel OAV.

So by chapter 5 I'd established that, while he's no Hitokiri Battousai and Hiten Mitsurugi heir, Shinta is still a talented warrior and one who is troubled by the violence he inflicts. I also laid the groundwork for some rival clans - thinking I'd given myself a nice, easy plot to move my main characters together, yet again having no idea of what I'd actually gotten myself into.

Here you can add a thread of blood-drenched and emotionally stark samurai epics as a recurring influence on this fic.

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	2. Chapters 6  through 10

6/CAST CLAY

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Enter Kaoru.

At this point, I had no idea what her history was - I wasn't even sure if she was going to have a history, or if it would just remain an unknown variable for the entire story. Is she really the snow woman? Is she a spell the snow woman conjured? Does she exist outside the snow woman's spell?

The monks I imagined here are probably completely anachronistic. I had in the back of my mind the movie Shaolin Temple starring a very young Jet Li.

Writing Kaoru like this was very difficult for me at first. While Shinta became more similar to Kenshin than I'd intended, Kaoru was more different. Without her identity as a kendo instructor and her father's daughter - as someone whose first characteristic is her lack of identity - what I mostly drew on was the Kyoto arc, after Kenshin leaves her. The idea that underneath all her strength and all her determination, she has this enormous fear of being alone - she carries this great emptiness, not even loneliness - more than loneliness - the state of being utterly alone.

A spirit "like a bowl full of water, tumbling over, ready to spill" - I'm still fond of this line.

It also took a while for me to work out the dynamic between Kaoru and Tomoe for this chapter. The idea is that Tomoe is _there_ - most of the time content to just watch, absorb the experience - but she'll step in to protect her mortal vessel when she needs to.

It's in keeping with Tomoe's RK character - really her character as a ghost/figment of Kenshin's imagination: someone who at heart is benevolent, would prefer to watch than do. And as the the snow woman she's actually being enormously benevolent by her standards (considering that the vast majority of her existence has been spent sucking the life out of mortals), but the experience is still terrifying for Kaoru - and the memory of her attack on Akira will forever haunt Kenshin.

However terrifying she might be, her passivity does make her a rather ineffective villain, so I had to further complicate the picture...

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7/A MEETING BETWEEN TWO TRAVELERS

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Clunky, expository writing. The Koshimizu daughter and the Kiyosato nephew aren't even characters, but I felt the need to explain the alliance. ...Ah well.

Speaking of the daimyo, I picture something along the lines of Akira Kurosawa's version of King Lir (I believe the film was Ran) - I'm rather fond of the mad, passionate, obstinate king. Here he's an original character - no parallel to RK or to Kwaidan - unless you consider him part of the general pastiche of Samurai Ghost Story.

I really like the idea of this old warrior personally offended that rival clans took advantage of his malaise after the death of his son. ...Which also seems like the thing to do if your son is perfect in every way. By rights the whole universe should have been mourning Akira. (Damn that heartless Saitoh!)

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Kenshin angst. Still trying to bring it home that even as a soldier rather than as an assassin, war is hell. He still lives to experience the consequences of having killed. He still feels separate from other people. The growing dread that his victims (if not his enemies themselves, then their survivors) must all resent him, all despise him.

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Kaoru "helping with the weaving" - less RK here and more Kwaidan, reminiscent of a couple of other ghost stories - one about another terrifying woman with long black hair, the other a sort of cinderella story with no happy ending, where wife = servant. Kaoru's situation is relatively happy, though. Genzai and Kohaku, the wife I invented for him, are both generous, kind-hearted people.

And now this haunted Kaoru begins to step into the shoes of the Kaoru we all know and love - being dutiful, learning a weapon, cross-dressing, beating the crap out of Yahiko...

Kaoru recognizes Kenshin because Tomoe recognizes him. Tomoe, in a way, was seeking him out - connected to Akira, he's the other one - the one who didn't interest her at first, the one she didn't kill (as will be hinted later).

(Also I don't know if RK Genzai is as crafty as this version... Here he's probably channeling some Uncle Iroh, which can only bring good things.)

It seems like I packed a _lot_ into this chapter, trying to move the plot along.

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8/THE BREAKING STORM

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Similar to RK canon, this Kenshin spent his mid-teens becoming increasingly isolated and depressed. Someone, anyone - anyone he considers an innocent - taking an interest in him at this low point just knocks him completely out of his tracks.

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"Maybe you're both possessed." Heh. Off-hand, Yahiko inadvertently tells Kaoru something about herself she'd rather not face... This is not the first time something like this will happen.

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In the Kwaidan Yuki Onna, the wife just shows up and follows the wood-picker home and that's it: they're together. I just couldn't see that working with Kenshin the samurai and Kaoru the lost girl.

So here we come to the giant storm. Something of the Bronte sisters in this - dramatic weather coinciding with the plot. Cinematic, a lot of visuals. ...And also this idea that Kaoru is connected with the weather, connected with these enormous forces outside of herself.

A lot of fear here. Samurai are not heroes in this story - they're awe-inspiring and powerful and dangerous and unpredictable. They signify the destruction of peace.

And then Kaoru developing as a character - instinctively putting herself on the line to protect others, heedless of the consequences.

Genzai knew they couldn't keep her because he is wise to the ways of folk tales.

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9/WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

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Another cameo: With Tomoe as a snow goddess, it naturally followed that Enishi would be a storm god.

There is something elemental and incestuous about their relationship in RK, too - very reminiscent of divine brother/sister stories.

Plotwise, since Tomoe is going to sit out most of the plot because she'd rather just see how it plays out, Enishi is going to step in now and again to protect his sister.

I could have gone a lot farther than this, but... it just didn't feel right. I thought of bringing him in at the end to slay Kaoru in order to free Tomoe from her prison of human flesh, but it just seemed too cheesy, not in keeping with the tone. Again there's the dissonance - as supernatural beings, Tomoe and Enishi operate on different timescales. A human lifetime in Kaoru's body is really not very long to them.

If Tomoe were trapped forever in a magical cave or something, I'm sure Enishi would go insane trying to get her out, but if she'd just like to amuse herself with a mortal life... well, he's more bemused than anything else - especially since it has the added benefit of getting her out and about in the summer time.

But none of this is actually apparent in this snippet - just the sense that there are huge forces around Kaoru, and she's only subconsciously aware of it.

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10/A NIGHT OF WOLVES

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One of my more conventional chapters. I think it works pretty well - actions and dialog actually move the plot along! (A rarity for me.)

Writing this one, I began to realize that teen/warrior angst Kenshin is really not as captivating as Meiji era RK Kenshin... and getting him together with Kaoru would take more than a vague sense of her being drawn to him.

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More Saitoh. Loving it. He's one of the few characters in this story who's fully comfortable with who he is and his role in society.

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And here we also start to get into this idea of humans trying to negotiate these supernatural powers - really the hubris of the more powerful humans thinking that that also gives them an edge over the supernatural.

Kaoru as damsel in distress - not my favorite role for her.

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	3. Chapters 11 through 15

11/DREAMS

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Another quick cameo, this time Jin-Eh - and now we finally get a glimpse of what is actually going on with Kaoru.

If Akira and Kenshin are moths, then Kaoru is a butterfly... I left that part of the poem out, but the imagery will come back, much later, in chapter 32.

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12/WAKING

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Though I had originally envisioned a Shinta/Kaoru story, I found myself writing Battousai/Kaoru instead. I hadn't realized how much of a difference it would make from my standard K/K. Battousai isn't just a killer - he's a teenager. Stressing his vulnerability rather than his strength - he's never been in love before, and he's falling for her. At this point, he half-expects her to be a form of divine justice... He had subconsciously wanted someone more like canon RK Tomoe - a wounded spirit who will punish him for his sins.

Kaoru still doesn't know what to make of him.

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Peasants keep their eyes down around samurai. Structural violence of the society, but rather than accepting it, it gets to Kenshin - he feels it as personal guilt, every time.

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Kenshin rolls his eyes at the notion that Kaoru will hurt him - he's still a teenager, a fraction less uptight than he is as canon Battousai.

(I love the idea that even adult, canon, Meiji era Kenshin with all his maturity and patience still secretly identifies strongly with Yahiko - that there's this inner part of him all insolence and snark.)

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The conversation in the tent - they're writing their own story, that they had both been peasants, drawn in different directions and meeting again.

A lot of sadness - sorrow over the injustices of the world. Again, similar in tone to RK's depiction of the bakumatsu, but where RK Tomoe reacts with guilt and anger and despair, in a similar setting Kaoru just... mourns.

Maybe not the most compelling story, all this weeping, but... for me, as a writer... it was a good place to put a lot of my own sadness when big problems like war and poverty or the small, petty, interpersonal injustices of society started to get me down.

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13/DAY

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A little face time for Katsura - less compelling than in canon, since he has less autonomy, and he's not so much fighting for an ideal as fighting out of a sense of duty, fighting for his clan. Similar to RK, he's worried that Kenshin's taking it all too seriously, that he has nothing else in his life.

Katsura and Akira probably understood each other very well.

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By this point I had decided that Kaoru really did need a backstory - something to inform her character, even if she wasn't aware of it herself. Writing this chapter, I knew that she actually had been brought back from the dead. She wasn't consciously aware of how remarkable it was that she was even alive - but she still had a heightened sense of how miraculous life is, even in the worse circumstances.

She's much more mature than Kenshin is at this point. It really made me appreciate RK Kaoru all the more - that her mannerisms may be outlandish and sometimes childish, but her heart is immensely wise. Kenshin in his thirties is an excellent match for her. Kenshin in his teens? ...Not so much.

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"Kenshin only felt like a storm should have risen then, around him. He felt that he had enough anger and despair within himself to generate hail and lightening."

A very Battousai moment, in the post-Tomoe, fannish sense.

It always bugs me when people suggest that Kenshin had this immense bloodlust as part of being a hitokiri. Rather, he had immense _self-control_ as a hitokiri. He was, if anything, bloodless - passionless. It was only after Tomoe died - only when Kaoru was threatened - that Kenshin really shifted gears into someone who might lose control of himself and kill out of passion.

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14/THE MANSION IN THE VALLEY

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Another long chapter, at least by my standards. Something about my style - even when I try to write something lengthy and coherent, it comes out as a sequence of drabbles. It probably would have been better to break them up.

Anyway, here we are in the midst of courtly ritual magic, and I'm drawing heavily on the Onmyoji films for their mechanics. Still Kwaidan in the surreal quality of the court itself - living human beings arranging themselves like statues, like chess pieces. The excellent book In Praise of Shadows was another big influence here.

Enter Megumi, upstaging everyone. If Saitoh is the character most comfortable with himself, Megumi is the one who pulls the most strings.

For this universe... It really made sense to me that she would be a priestess - not because magic is mystical but because here it's _not_. It's very mechanical. It's almost too mechanical. It's just another form of power play. It's just the sort of thing an intelligent woman who is proud of her intelligence would master.

It is, in fact, a form of medicine.

But yes. Megumi, Megumi... Megumi and her contradictions. So poised but so _rude_. Holding herself to an immense standard and disdaining anyone else who doesn't meet it.

I think she and the daimyo have an interesting relationship. She manipulates him as much as she can (to further her own plans), but he'll put his foot down when he wants to.

(The creaking floorboards, by the way, while I'm name-dropping my sources, are actually meant to be the "nightingale floors" found in some Japanese villas - they were designed to whisper like birdsong when trodden upon, to warn of assassins.)

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"Kaoru thought of Kenshin and the daimyo and wondered if this entire household was haunted, or cursed. The old man was still speaking of his dead son, and Kaoru felt her heart suddenly throbbing out of rhythm and she wished that this entire mansion could be torn down.

That sunlight could find every shadow."

Yes to haunted and yes to cursed. She'll get her wish.

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The timid young maid... Is is Tsubame? Perhaps. If so, someone probably made sure she survived the coming destruction - she probably got bundled off to a village somewhere.

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Megumi, like Katsura, is a pragmatist, and she's good at what she does. She stays on top of meeting supernatural wants and needs, and she also has human spies.

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15/HEARTH

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I love how Megumi is genuinely annoyed by people who are simple and good.

For the curious: the promise she made Akira was only something to the effect that she would stay out of it and not ask any questions. ...Because he didn't want a powerful shaman getting in the way of his affair with a life-force draining snow spirit.

(I think this story reads like glimpses of a supernatural soap opera with its host of characters wandering in and wandering out, dying and coming back.)

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Kaoru in the kitchen: First, something of The Last Unicorn in this. A mingling of rich and poor, supernatural and mundane, at the edge of the world. A misplaced spirit searching for herself.

Also, while Kaoru would probably never make a great cook, if someone actually took the time to teach her, starting with the basics, I'm sure she'd do fine. In fact I think the biggest reason she can't cook in canon is that she knows she's bad at it and gets flustered and frustrated with herself. Some patient training would take care of that.

With the trays of food, I was thinking of Dae Jang Geum. And in general, if you want to meet people and make yourself useful and be in a warm and interesting environment, the kitchen is probably the best place to be.

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Kenshin is starting to grow, starting to open up.

And then the idea that the land around the villa is actually a sort of garden - not just a nod to Japanese landscaping but the idea that even this cursed, doomed land stained by sorrow and the most banal, resigned sort of evil has people who tend it, people who care for it.

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	4. Chapters 16 through 20

16/HARVEST

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For my own benefit, really, I had to break the story up. Writing it had started to drag a bit - I imagine reading it might have started to drag as well. So kind of to show what it was we were aiming for and that this all really was going somewhere, I jumped ahead to the bucolic future.

It helped - I could get back into Kenshin's head and feel his blood flowing. Throughout Kenshin's POV I tried to emphasize the physicality of his experience. That's one thing he has going for him in battousai/teenage mode - this powerful physical presence that he keeps tamped down, for the most part, as an adult in RK. In both universes Kaoru responds to him physically even if she tries not to show it.

We also get the foolishness of Kenshin's fatalism. We know he's not going to die - which is really not something you generally want to do as a writer - utterly deflate all of your dramatic tension. I tried to hold on to some ambiguity by leaving the outcome of the birth unknown.

And it really winds up being rather romantic, even if I had sometimes despaired of any chemistry developing between the two of them.

A turning point in the writing of the story. From here I felt more comfortable with the main relationship and I fell into the rhythm of short chapters in clusters, which I think work better for this tale.

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17/THE SWORD THAT PROTECTS

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The title is such a powerful phrase in canon. I wanted to reference that - reference the strength of Kaoru's personality - and then continuing the themes of the previous chapter, while Kenshin's risks and Kenshin's strengths lie in fighting (up to this point), Kaoru's risks and strengths lie in nurturing, which is no easy thing.

The idea for this chapter really came from one of the comments. Chapter 14, Chronicle Sleeper wondered if Kaoru would do something to help the people. At first I thought "Nahhh... This isn't that kind of story." Then later, after I had actually introduced Kaoru to some of the characters who would be at risk, I realized that _of course_ that's what Kaoru would do.

I think originally it was going to be much simpler. There would be a duel with Saitoh. The daimyo would demand that Kenshin abandon the clan and run away with Kaoru. ...But Kenshin and Kaoru spend enough of this story being pushed around by more powerful characters. Instead it was very nice to give them a chance to fight for some things for themselves.

Here the idea is that, as an outsider, Kaoru just blurts out what other people either don't think or don't say - that there's a sickness to such fatalism as well as a dignity.

And then Megumi shows up to torment her before giving her exactly what she needs. ...Typical. Typical of Megumi's goodness as well as her spite.

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18/GO

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I resisted and resisted letting Sano into this story, because I was afraid he would just utterly take it over. Kaoru had had so little real interaction with Kenshin, and he was such a closed-off depressive mess, I was afraid she would develop a much feistier relationship with Sanosuke and the core relationship of the story would be shot.

But once Megumi packed Kaoru up and sent her off to lead the refugees, she had to be bossing around Sano as well. There just wasn't any way around it. Luckily this plunged Sano into enough of a depression that he couldn't flirt with Kaoru the way he might have otherwise.

Kaoru and Kenshin's relationship is still tentative, tender. Teenage love. Yet again, Kaoru just tears through the constraints of society that she doesn't agree with, can't understand - not even out of rebellion, she just doesn't even see what she's tearing apart. Kenshin, who is so trapped by these constraints - he's becoming utterly devoted to her. She barely sees what she's freed him from.

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19/SLAY EVERY EVIL

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I am so glad I had Saitoh to offer a totally different point of view from most of the rest of the characters. Again, he's someone purely at home in this bleak universe - the master of his realm. He relishes it.

In this chapter Misao and Aoshi are also moving in. For one thing I like the sound of "Mibu and Makimachi" and for another I thought it might be interesting to see them outside of the Kenshin-gumi, see them as enemies, if only in glimpses.

Kenshin is still a soldier, still a killer. He doesn't ever make a no-killing vow the way he does in RK, but it still makes him sick. Here he's the one to decimate the ranks of the pseudo-oniwabanshu. A bit of a role reversal - Misao rather than Aoshi is the one closest to them, and I could see her becoming totally enraged, losing any self-control she might have had.

So she's the Makimachi prince (implying that the family had no other sons). Aoshi is the captain of her forces. Another rank-and-file member snatched her out of danger - she's well loved.

Because Kenshin's beginning to allow himself to feel things, he's so distracted by Misao, by not wanting to cut down another enemy, that he fails to protect Katsura. He's fast enough that if he had been paying more attention he could have saved him.

And then the duel with Saitoh. This would be the equivalent of his duel with Hiko in RK - it's not enough to be strong, he has to _want _to live in order to survive.

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20/GATHERING SHADES

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Then I had to remind myself I was still writing a ghost story. The Tomoe bit here is rather more confusing than I meant it to be. It doesn't really make any sense until you read the next few chapters, and even then it doesn't quite fit. It couldn't fit - again, I was trying to convey a dissonance between what a snow spirit experiences and what a human experiences, but I'm afraid it just reads like a big, jumbled inconsistency.

Anyway, the inside of court ritual - I figured that if you do it right, it really does signify something to an immortal, but how they perceive it, how they act on it - it's still a huge gamble.

The daimyo, being so close to death - not to mention brazenly insane - probably gets closer to Tomoe than anyone else.

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And Kaoru is getting flashes of this. Moving toward the mountain, as summer wanes.

Banter with Sano, who's in a bad enough mood to just fight with her the whole time. Sibling relationship established, romantic crisis averted. Sigh of relief.

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Moving away from the haunted villa, we couldn't leave without meeting Akira one last time, since he started the whole thing.

It's really sad that he and Tomoe don't actually interact beyond the first two chapters. He knows that he never meant the same thing to her and she has moved on (very different from RK canon). Instead he's just haunting the villa - haunting his own lost youth, but also sticking around to fulfill his duty. He's still the prince. He may be dead, but he's still bound to protect this place. ...I guess you could see it as his payment for losing his life - it wasn't really his to sacrifice.

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	5. Chapters 21 through 25

21/THE LAST BATTLE

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The last battle of Himura Kenshin, retainer to the Kiyosato clan.

Akira is acting as the sempai again, making sure his kohai plays by the rules. Kenshin can't just walk away - he has to dishonor himself; he has to deliberately relinquish his name.

And even though he was disconnected from Tomoe once he was dead, even though he didn't try to hold onto her, it's still satisfying for Akira to fight Kenshin for taking her away.

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22/THE LAST KIYOSATO

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This title and the next one are actually a throwback to the opening sentence of chapter 7 - the Kiyosato really are going to fight to the last breath, in the person of Megumi.

Megumi being who she is, she's not just going to quietly accept an honorable death; she's going to do everything in her power to ensure that the future looks brighter than the past. Since she's a priestess, that means spelling the most powerful curses she can cast to protect the inhabitants of the land.

The power of sacrifice. The power of mass death. Inspiration here is the demise of the Taira clan as depicted in Kwaidan as well as the magical protections placed upon the imperial capital in Onmyoji.

So it's grotesque.

This is actually the moment that Kaoru experienced in chapter 20 from Tomoe's point of view.

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23/THE LAST BREATH

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So yeah. Megumi in this universe... is troubled, I guess you could say.

I'll throw in another reference here: Lone Wolf and Cub. I'm picturing a society where there's a lot of casual violence. The strong dominate the weak, hierarchies are propped up by ritual, and that's just how it is.

Very early on, Megumi figured out that she was smart enough and talented enough to rise to a position of power. Certainly as a child, she was singled out - probably became an apprentice. She began to learn how to read people, manipulate people.

So very early on she made a choice - she would be ambitious. She would gain power for herself. She would use it to her own purposes - not so much for personal gain but so that she could try to make the future more like a place she would want to be.

She was never happy - she had given up all hope for anything like happiness in her own life - and she was bitter about that, angry.

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Aoshi is smart enough to recognize an enormously powerful curse when he sees it.

I suppose that even though Megumi really did want to wreak a bloody vengeance on the Makimachi - probably taking out every resentment she'd harbored throughout her life - another part of her felt that it was better to avoid such violence, otherwise she wouldn't have warned him at all.

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In general, she was a very sane person, very self-controlled - but this curse unleashed everything she'd been holding inside. It sent her spirit around the bend.

Put it all together, and you get... a particularly powerful and frightening version of a kitsune.

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24/SURVIVORS

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Then we come to Sanosuke, Megumi's counterpart.

They grew up together. Each was the most important person in the other's life, but at the same time they'd never admit it, and on top of that they couldn't stand each other.

Sano resents Megumi for leaving him in the dirt while she ascended the social ladder, and Megumi resented that Sano would never have to face the choices she'd had to make. He's lazy and cynical. Life is easy for him.

It was all right when they could fight and flirt, but now all that is over. Of course Megumi had to have the last word, and Sano resents her for that, too.

...Poor Sano.

The irony is that he's somewhat psychic himself. If he had had any interest in it, he probably could have been a shaman in his own right. (But it's just as well, because that's a miserable job, as Sano would be the first to say.)

Sano's also _nice_, the way Megumi wasn't. While Megumi became waspish around Kaoru's vulnerability, Sano feels drawn to protect her. Megumi felt that people should be able to protect themselves.

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25/STRAGGLING FORWARD

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And now Kenshin - rather, Shinta - is himself one of the bodies of the field. Further role reversal: rather than mourning his death, the old woman is robbing him.

A sword carries the soul of its owner. The old woman was superstitious, so she left it alone.

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While Shinta is discovering his inner drive, Kaoru is losing hers to the coming winter.

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	6. Chapters 26 through 30

26/TWO PILGRIMS

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The main purpose of this chapter was to give Shinta a chance to recover a bit before hitting the road.

I had a tendency to rush the story, timeline wise. The past several chapters in particular really ought to have taken a few weeks rather than a few days. That's definitely a skill I need to develop - if this were a first draft rather than a single run, published on the go, I would (among many other things) revisit the timing and pacing of the whole Kaoru-in-the-villa episode. Knowing me, it might change the whole story.

But anyway, this is Shinta's first glimpse, as an adult, of what peasant life might be like. He's just beginning to realize that there's not a single homogenous state of peasantry but that the closer you look the more nuanced everything becomes. True to RK, kids love him, even at his low points.

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Tomoe's influence on Kaoru here is, for once, self-explanatory.

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27/THE STORY OF THE GIRL WHO FOUGHT A GOD

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And with that lead up it just felt like a good time to break away into Kaoru's backstory.

This fic is largely based on folk tales, and with all the POV switching and poetry thrown in, it didn't feel wrong to adopt another stylistic contrast: the folk tale itself.

Inspiration here was first and foremost the bear rituals of the Ainu people, which then quickly translated into Princess Mononoke style spirit manifestations.

So here we have the basis for Kaoru's self-confidence as well as her vulnerability: her father raised her to believe in herself and follow in his footsteps, and then he died by his ideals. She was left alone to live up to those same ideals surrounded by people who disdained her. Since this is not Meiji era Tokyo but instead a small tribe in the mythical past, I figured the disdain would be much more consistent - even if some individuals had sympathy for Kaoru, the tribe as a whole rejected her.

And throughout the story, you see this idea of trying to bargain with spirits. The more pragmatic the bargaining, the more risky it seems to become.

The bear god didn't even reject the people outright. He just... lost interest and fell asleep. The absolutely galling thing is how utterly insignificant they are in his mind.

So Kaoru dies senselessly.

It's probably pretty obvious, but this universe I created is very unfair. Even the snow goddess, taking pity on Kaoru, has basically the same perspective on humans that the bear god does, though she doesn't phrase it so bluntly. (This is the only thing I'll say about a possible moral of this story, as I see it: the heroes are the people who are able to see the humanity in each other and do good things in spite of having the odds stacked so much against them.)

The bear god might be the only character with a sense of humor. Why does he find the idea of offering Enishi a human popsicle snack hilarious? ...Beats me. Oh right. So I could connect the "sister" of chapter 9 to the "brother" of chapter 27. :)

And then Tomoe is left alone with a couple of corpses, one old and one new. What on earth is she supposed to do with those? ...Ok I guess _I_ find it kind of funny.

(Mechanics-wise, once Tomoe laid any sort of claim on Kaoru the girl was hers, lying frozen in a mostly-dead, suspended state until the day when Tomoe felt like being human for a while and remembered that, conveniently, she had a frozen human body stashed away with its soul mostly intact.)

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28/WHAT THE WINTER SAW

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Mostly just to give a Tomoe-watching-Kenshin counterpoint to the Enishi-watching-Kaoru snippet as we transition back into our regular programming.

Tomoe doesn't notice much when it comes to humans - just very broad strokes. Akira was bright and friendly. Kaoru... I wish I had this one stanza I had written of what it's like for Tomoe to inhabit Kaoru - how Kaoru feels so many things and her heart beats fast. What the sunlight is like on her skin. Fluttering heartbeat, beating wings, butterfly.

With Kenshin, Tomoe picks up on his sadness and his guilt (perhaps also reflecting what Kaoru noticed when they first met?). Everywhere he goes, he's tracking blood.

Oh, and also to give the idea that Tomoe is waking up in her own right with the coming winter, the mountain, the shrine.

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29/MEETING AGAIN

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Shinta never having killed his wife as in RK is dangerous; there's a callousness about the way he kills. He often regrets it, but he's also capable of killing without a second thought. He's never going to completely lose that in this story - he's never going to become the person he becomes in RK.

It does take its toll on him.

He's so happy to be back with Kaoru. He almost notices that there's something very wrong with her, but he's so relieved to be with her.

Sitting in the circle: he never realized it consciously, but being separated from most of the rest of humanity by violence or class is something that's always been wrong in his life and now that's it's finally over he might actually find some happiness.

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I love how Kaoru's already fighting to hold onto her own mind and Shinta's just distracted by the fact that he's sitting next to her (cute!).

(And it's actually the best thing for Kaoru - Shinta will always draw her back into herself and ground her because when he's with her he's really with _her_. The snow goddess is almost like a recurring illness they just have to deal with. Shinta will always see it as an outside threat descending upon them, not as Kaoru herself.)

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30/AUTUMN

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Kaoru and Shinta in a rare moment of warm, unsullied bliss. I tried to be delicate about it but still sensual.

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Cut to Sanosuke. Because when you're miserable nothing is more obnoxious than having to listen to your neighbors having sex. :-/

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	7. Chapters 31 through 35

31/PRAYER

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This Katsuhiro is indeed RK Katsuhiro, Sanosuke's friend the artist/newspaper editor/arsonist.

The one major conversion error I made over this whole fic is that his nickname should have been Katsu but I shorted it to Hiro, and when I noticed I had gotten it wrong I was already a couple of chapters ahead and it was too late to fix it.

Mirine - the same Mirine from chapter 2 - is an original character. She's not really based on anyone. She's sensible and self-contained. Unlike most RK characters, she's fairly nondescript. She's very businesslike - if she sees something that needs to happen she doesn't fuss but just gets the job done.

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I didn't really want to dwell a lot on the shrine community - I was ready to move ahead to the climax rather than dragging the story out too much longer. ...It's kind of a shame, because this is actually one of the more interesting plot setups - the mismatched band of refugees learning to live together, all the conflicting relationships.

But you do get this chapter, and one thing that's kind of unusual in RK in that Shinta actually sees the men around him as possible rivals for Kaoru's affection. He's usually on such firm footing with her - both in canon and in fanfic - that his own rampant jealous streak is kept at bay.

He's pretty secure in this story, too, but not so much that he doesn't sometimes worry. If there hadn't been the whole snow woman issue knocking her out for most of the winter and binding the two of them together... there might have been some real conflict here.

Because in canon, Kaoru falls in love with Kenshin, the kind, wise, and self-confident _man_ - including the parts of him that are frightened and violent and insecure. But if she had met him when he was predominantly the latter, I just don't think it would have been such a sure thing.

[So I wrote Gaman - what Shinta worries about here and is mistaken about might be something that is a real current in RK but is something that Kenshin dismisses.]

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I had to scramble to invent some kind of economy for this shrine. I figured that the farther away you get from the parasitic nobility the more food people would be able to hold onto, and you could actually support this sort of peasant shrine. With a group of refugees of this size, they'd have to supplement their upkeep with their own food - which they have, from Megumi. I suspect that in the following summer the group will split up even further - probably Mirine and Hiro will lead a few to go join a village somewhere, because they have strength and skills to offer, while the old woman and probably another adult and a child will stay to tend the shrine.

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The situation with Kaoru and Tomoe is still very surreal. Being physically present at her own shrine as winter approaches, Tomoe responds - resonates, really - as people call to her - similar to Megumi speaking to her in Kaoru's body, but much stronger. It's like Kaoru shouting at the bear god at his own lair: here Tomoe can't help but respond.

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32/SNOW

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Shinta connects the snow woman with the women of the battlefield. Actually the two have nothing to do with each other and Tomoe couldn't care less how many people Shinta/Kenshin has killed (like she could talk) - but it's significant for Shinta, significant that he feels he has done wrong.

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This scene deliberately echoes the opening scene. And it's also - though I didn't write it - a foretaste of the closing scene.

Someday the snow woman will be through with Kaoru, and it will end just like this: the cold and the whirlwind and the aching loneliness.

I guess I just thought that was too sad to actually write...

[Now an obsolete statement.]

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The snow woman speaks: This is the equivalent of the big reveal in Kwaidan. I tried to make it similarly chilling, though the situation is different. Less climactic here, but still a fright that the snow woman is there where he least expects her.

I had originally planned to follow Kwaidan much more closely, but once Kaoru headed toward the snow woman's shrine I knew this moment had to take place here.

Although actually... As I mentioned back in the commentary for chapter 2, the very setup of this story meant that this reveal had to be significantly different from Kwaidan. Kaoru is not a _disguise_ for the snow woman - she is possessed by her (actually that's the only reason she's alive). And so instead of being terrified by the appearance of the snow woman as Shinta was in the first chapter - as the wood cutter was in Kwaidan - here the story demands that he fight through his fear to claim his woman.

(Don't get me wrong, the Kwaidan story is poignant in its own way - but it's a different story, and it's more about the fact that they have children. Speaking of which...)

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Tomoe's motivation, by the way, is that she's a romantic - or rather, she's curious about romance, curious about human emotion. What she first glimpsed with Akira is something that Shinta and Kaoru are now swimming in, so she'll stick around to enjoy it... at least for a while.

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33/SOLSTICE

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Sanosuke is getting the hell out of this story, and I don't blame him.

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"At night her body lay cool and still, and he lay still beside her, waiting... Every night expecting the cold touch, the endless darkness, an icy kiss."

This winter is a big turning point for Shinta and Kaoru. It teaches them - not with words, but physically, it teaches them - at least gives them an idea - of what's going on and how they can cope with it.

Shinta never sees Kaoru and the snow woman as the same person. For both of them, it's more like Kaoru suffers from an illness. Shinta being Shinta, he sees it as something like a punishment against himself. He even expects the snow woman to eventually kill him, but he isn't afraid. Without the vow to stop killing and make amends, part of Shinta will always be expecting and dreading and hoping for divine punishment.

Instead, for now, he gets a reprieve. Much more difficult than dying.

Kaoru forces him to live - really live, not just wait for death. She insists on it.

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34/KITSUNE

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This chapter was actually what I originally had in mind for an epilogue - and I return to it in the epilogue - but I figured Kenshin and Kaoru were passing that way anyway, it made more sense to just show it through their experiences.

Megumi's vengeance. No other clan will be able to hold this land while the curse still holds - the kitsune eviscerates enemy soldiers, and if she needs reinforcements she has the ghosts of the daimyo, the prince, and a few other Kiyosato. Behind them, a thread of obligation from the snow goddess, should she happen to take notice.

Megumi's insight was that, since the Kiyosato are all dead, it means that no armed nobility will be able to tax and wound this land at all. The people will actually be able to breathe and recover for a few generations, at least. So her vicious loyalty to the Kiyosato is actually a way to fight for the people.

But anyway that was her plan, and then as a demon, she's kind of crazy, and she can afford to be playful the way she couldn't as the power behind the throne.

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A bit incongruous, Shinta's nonchalance - a taste of what the Meiji era is to RK Kenshin after Bakumatsu - subtle changes, but so profound it almost makes him delirious with happiness - such a small taste of happiness, Kaoru is alive and recovering. People aren't cowering away from him anymore.

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35/COMING HOME

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And this is really... I didn't plan this, this sudden terror that Shinta would have, once he thinks that everything might be all right - the sense that he doesn't have a place in a peaceful world.

It's when things start to normalize for Kaoru - her interactions with the monks - the glimpse of the notion that she belongs here and she can get on perfectly fine without him.

Shinta has to make a choice. This probably could have been its own arc, but I don't even leave him hanging for a single chapter, because in the very next section, Yahiko confronts him.

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And that's it: he chooses. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, whether he deserves her or not, he's going to stay with Kaoru.

And this is when you really start to get the happy ending.

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	8. Chapter 36 through The End

36/PEACE

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Or at least what passes for a happy ending.

We've spent a lot of time with Shinta, and Kaoru hasn't even been herself for most of it. It was time to get back to her.

I wanted to suggest what she gained from this horrible winter. The insert of her backstory also corresponded with her own memory - though she only got fragments and feelings.

So she has that, now. She has a sense of who she is - who she was. And she'll have that, she'll hold onto it - not just her past but what she gains in the present - through anything.

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Home and family. Kaoru instinctively forms relationships with people. It's her greatest strength. Genzai and Kohaku aren't just a nice old couple, they become her grandparents. Yahiko isn't just an orphan, he becomes her brother.

If she hadn't been so much under the influence of the snow goddess at the shrine, she would have formed stronger relationships there, too. She still managed to make deeper friendships than Shinta did (it's a skill he hasn't yet developed).

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The hut, the plow - trying to recall, if not resolve, the flashforward from chapter 16.

The thunder is Enishi, still calling to his sister, and there's a story there...

In fact even as I typed the last sentence I was thinking ahead to what I would write for the next chapter, but then I realized that this was as emotionally resolved as Shinta and Kaoru were going to get. I couldn't really add anything to their achievements.

With the other longish story I wrote, Pomegranate, I reached an emotional resolution while still planning a couple of epilogue chapters and the story just waited and waited and waited, incomplete, because every time I sat down to try, I couldn't write them. Emotionally, there was nothing more to say. Finally I just had to mark the story as complete. Looking back on it, I still wouldn't add anything. I think it really is complete - everything that needed to be said was said. But on the other hand... Pomegranate was a prequel to begin with, with a whole series of stories to tell what happened later and how the characters evolved.

I didn't want to make the same mistake again, but I'm afraid I erred too far in the other direction. This time I was too quick to call it done.

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37/EPILOGUE I: NATSUKO

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So then I went back and wrote this whole commentary, up to chapter 36 - really because, this entire time, I felt like there was so much going on behind the scenes, when it came to characters, and I had deliberately restricted myself to showing only glimpses, almost entirely limiting myself to what Shinta and Kaoru experienced... in keeping with the whole evocative, suggestive, mysterious theme. But I've been tempted this whole time to explain more, and now I finally can!

When I first ended the story, I was thinking of French New Wave cinema - very surreal, nothing explained. Evocative. Ending at a good moment regardless of whether anything makes sense.

I still think that would have been adequate - frustrating, but adequate. However, when I did write the epilogue, I think it didn't just tie up some loose ends but it made the fic as a whole a much more satisfying story - with beginning, middle, end, and character development - so I was very pleased.

Anyway. The epilogue.

The first and most obvious question was the outcome of the birth, an actual scene in flash forward that had ended on a cliff hanger.

My reference here is Rikki Lake's documentary on natural birth, since I myself have never given birth. I was very struck by how empowering it is for a woman - mothers talked about how wonderful it is to have a child, no matter what - but giving birth at home with a midwife (vs the USA standard of hospitalization, the model I grew up with) was much more of an achievement, a much more transcendental experience. Barring a serious complication, it's actually very safe - it can still be painful beyond all imagining, but then that pain is totally eclipsed by ecstasy when the child has actually been born.

So Shinta could justly be worried out of his mind, but Kaoru could just as rightly triumph in her achievement.

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Natsuko means "summer child" - particularly significant for Kaoru and Shinta.

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38/EPILOGUE II: FRUITS

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But then the irony (with me there's always a twist) is that Natsuko and Koji (born a couple of years later) are actually the winter's children. The mechanics of the supernatural: If Tomoe's the one giving Kaoru life, then the new life of her children must also come from Tomoe.

Which is why a) Natsuko in particular has something like autism (because her mother is a snow spirit, not because she's Tomoe), and b) Koji is named Koji instead of Kenji - he's not the same child, though they have a lot of similarities.

The maturity of the story... is that the supernatural is no longer terrifying. It's just something that Shinta and Kaoru have to deal with.

And they are Kaoru's children, just as much as they are Tomoe's. (Yet another largely unecessary reference: Oscar and Lucinda, Lucinda raising Oscar's child and you know it didn't make a single shred of difference to her - that boy became her son and she loved him as such.)

Then, because they are Kaoru's children, they are also Shinta's children. He is the natural father, but I think that this is true even in canon, with Kenji - Kenshin is able to consider himself a father first and foremost because Kaoru is a mother. Without ever having to say it, she both allows and demands that he assume a normal role in society and in his family.

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Then I just wanted to spell out, a bit more, that things did change quite a bit after the fall of the Kiyosato. Again, a big difference from RK - Shinta participated in these events, but he didn't have any kind of ideological stake in them. There can be good rulers and there can be bad rulers, for all sorts of reasons... But I will restrain myself for climbing up on a soap box to give a speech.

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38/EPILOGUE III: THE LAST SEASON

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I think the epilogue was so easy for me to write, once I actually started, because, after all the arduous work of the main story, and letting time take its course, Kaoru and especially Shinta have finally matured into characters I personally feel more comfortable with.

I didn't realize that initially. I had dreaded writing this scene - I went out of my way to avoid it. It first started popping into my head ages ago, back around... perhaps as early as chapter 14. At that time I didn't know whether this story would end like the climax of the Kwaidan version or whether Enishi would reclaim his sister - the first seemed like it would be too stark and depressing (the resolution is that Shinta loses her after all? what a downer!) - the latter seemed like it would be not only depressing but cheesy.

But since Kaoru and Shinta had actually matured, it came to mean something entirely different.

They did achieve a happy life together, and they did form a family - not only through their children but with Genzai and Kohaku and Yahiko. They had that, and Kaoru's whole point - that it was worth it, even if it wasn't for as long as they would have wished - became especially significant.

So Enishi calls Tomoe back to being herself full-time, and it isn't flashy, but actually subdued (which really makes me want to write more AU in which the relationship between Tomoe and Enishi is not so dominated by trauma), and Kaoru says goodbye.

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40/EPILOGUE IV: THE LAST NIGHT

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Lo and behold, after so much journeying, I looked around and was surprised to find myself exactly where I had started (but internally, very different): in the version of Yuki Onna depicted in Kwaidan.

I don't really have much to say about this scene. It's the culmination of everything that's already been said.

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(I will point out Kaoru's body: More mechanics of possession, another early idea that managed to slip in before the finish line.)

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41/EPLIOGUE FINAL: THE LAST DAWN

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I had had no preconceived idea of this scene at all. I just knew that the previous chapter was not - and could not be - the final note.

An idea of the household post-Kaoru. Not a particularly happy or affectionate family. I tried to hint at what it would have been like for those children - a sorrow-filled father, a dead mother, but at the same knowing, at some level, that they are also the children of a living spirit. A lot of sorrow and pain and misunderstanding... But also sympathy and devotion.

Shinta pulled through after Kaoru, because of Kaoru. And now he'll finally get to join her.

So, really... triumphant. In its way.

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FINAL AUTHOR'S NOTE

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From chapter to chapter, this story has had a mind of its own, fighting me and redirecting me every step of the way, and I think the biggest surprise of all is how readily the epilogue came to me when I decided to write it - and how much there was to say.

I'm sure it was because I did go through and write a commentary for every chapter - for the first time I had a very thorough idea of the whole story in my head, I knew which pieces were missing, and I knew how it would end. It just came together.

And at the same time, I'm glad that I was flying blind for most of it, even if it was very uneven as a result, because I think that that was what allowed me to actually stay interested and see it through to the end.

Now I have what I would regard as a complete first draft - or more like an illustrated outline, if I were being very ambitious. It will almost certainly remain in this state, unless inspiration strikes again in another eight years or so. :)

Even though I can see so many flaws in this story, it actually makes me feel much better about myself as a writer. I feel like I'm developing a process, and now I have an idea of how I would go about writing a longer, plot-driven piece.

So thank you, again, to everyone who read and commented, everyone who enjoyed! It really means a lot, to know that what interests you as a writer can be of interest outside your own head, even if it's very jumbled and strange. :)

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